Status Updates From Backlash: The Undeclared Wa...

sorry she is talking about psychology and i remembered 1) kitty and max sent me changing our minds last year and i need to read it 2) i have so little respect for psychologists

"The Victorian era gave rise to mass media + mass marketing -- two institutions that have since proved more effective devices for constraining women's aspirations than coercive laws + punishments. They rule with the club of conformity, not censure, + claim to speak for female public opinion, not powerful male interests."

"This map is in itself harmful to women's rights; it presents women's struggle for liberty as if it were a one-time event, a curious + even noxious by-product of a postmodern age.

It is, as poet + essayist Adrienne Rich has described it, 'the erasure of women's political + historical past which makes each new generation of feminists appear as an abnormal excrescence on the face of time.'"

"In the popular imagination, the history of women's rights is more commonly charted mostly as a flat dead line.

Ignoring the many peaks + valleys traversed in the endless march toward liberty, this mental map of American women's progress presents instead a great plain of 'traditional' womanhood, upon which women have roamed helplessly + 'naturally', eternally passive subjects until the 70s movement came along."

As Farrell himself warned in his 1971 New York Times essay, “the image of masculinity is so all-pervasive” that “it is easier to use surgery” to change a man’s sex than it is “to undo the social and cultural conditioning.”

men are always doing this nowadays

The new field readers, for the most part, neither understood nor supported educational equity. One reader, whose job was to review applications that would help enforce Title IX, asked the panel’s moderator plaintively, “What is Title Nine?” Another woman, who was supposed to be reviewing applications to help disabled women, wanted to know if being a Native American qualified as a “disability.”

rofl 😞

this is definitely a bit of a slog

‘They had to work and they wanted to work; yet no one else wanted them to, neither the employers they had to deal with nor the male workers they had to work beside nor the men whose beds they shared. If they kept working, they were humiliated at the office, assailed in the shower stalls, and beaten at home; if they tried to obey the social signals and go home, they would starve.’

Just finished chapter 2. It's blowing me away that this is a 1990s book. We are so very influenced, still, by the shitty anti-women-biased reporting of the 80s. I had no clue.

Can’t help but think of The Atlantic c. 2026 when I read passages like, “The absence of real women in a news account that is allegedly about real women is a hallmark of 80s backlash journalism. The press delivered the backlash to the public through a series of ‘trend stories,’ articles that claimed to divine sweeping shifts while providing little in the way of evidence to support their generalizations.”